Eliot, in his preface to St.-John Perse, notes that much the difficulty of the Anabasis is due to the suppression of connective material: it is a narrative, but one in which the narrative links have been suppressed. Barbara Guest's "The Altos" is similar, with the difference being that much more is suppressed. Four lines stand alone on a page: "with many branches / coldest butter / alive in the coal meadow / tipped the grief-scale." One would have to imagine the entire page filled in with connective tissue. Discursive coherence is stretched to the breaking point. At other times, however, a section will seem relatively straigthtforward: "an invisible weight / swam in the / night into thunder / cannot find / the platinum / bird coat." What little discursive coherence there is, the mind seizes upon it. Here is my tentative "plot summary":

I. A bird, a warbler, crosses a river into an ethereal landscape. There is a question of finding a bell.
II. Someone describes a place near the sea, "located harbors," in highly oblique metaphors.
III. The question of "walking somewhere" is considered. The bell is a metaphor for something in the sky (the bird?).
IV. A metaphorical description of a sacred space?
V. More rapid movement: a road by the side of a river, a narrow space. There is now an "us" in the poem.
VI. Back at the harbor. The place called "Altos" (from the title of the poem) appears. References to things worn on the head (turbans, the braided helmet). Evening comes.
VII. Sounds and smells of evening traversing a street.
VIII. A weight swimming through the night in search of the bird or bell.
IX. A dream of a botanical form or "stalk image."
X. Disconnected images of branches, butter, meadow, "grief-scale." Perhaps related to the dream in previous section.
XI. The poem concludes. References to barriers and borders. We are at the place called "Altos." People are perhaps too credulous about "staged clouds," putting too much credence in this imaginary, ethereal landscape. Some animal form, "soft meat," crosses the border once again.

The other possibility is that one is not supposed to try so hard to connect the dots.